"The Name
of Our Country is América" - Simón Bolívar

The new edition is now available
and also includes a new introduction by Lisa Fithian, who worked
with Abbie, Johanna Lawrenson and I (and many of you!) causing
trouble in the 1980s. Of course, we're still at it, for as long
as tyranny is on the loose. ¡Hasta la victoria, siempre!
Here's what I wrote...

Still a Steal

By Al Giordano

"He just
had the idea it would be a good little gag to liberate
this book from the bookstores. And we put 'STEAL THIS BOOK' on
the back cover of Woodstock Nation and the Random House
sales manager went bananas. 'We can't do this!' The crazier he
went, the more Abbie loved it.

"At that point Abbie decided that his next book
was going to be called Steal This Book and that's at least part
of the reason that Random House refused to publish it. Also,
they had a few problems with instructions for how to blow up
things. I don't know if they ever noticed that the little Random
House logo on Woodstock Nation was the little Random House
being blown up."

Abbie Hoffman was
one hundred percent into anything he did. There was no
such thing as halfway with Abbie. A task was either something
worth going to jail for, worth dying for, or it was not worth
doing.

Abbie had the same approach to writing books.

He wrote the introduction to Steal This Book from
the Cook County Jail in 1970, from where he boasted that he was
learning "the only rehabilitation possible - hatred of oppression."

Of all his seven published works, Steal This Book
was the most widely read, the most notorious.

Revolution for the Hell of It, or Woodstock Nation,
or The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman may be better books
- where his writing skills shone and he made arguments, to convince
the reader, rather than the how-to manual structure of this one
- but Steal This Book was, and remains, the most memorable
of his literary works for the scandals it caused. It was also
probably his most effectively radical because it was,
largely, a how-to book.

"The title
is 90 percent of the work," lamented the late independent
filmmaker Jack Smith, but Abbie would somehow find another 110
percent, and that's what he put into Steal This Book.
It was a "survival guide," exhaustively researched,
to finding "Free food free clothing and furniture
free transportation free land free housing
free education free medical care free communication
free play free money free dope ." to
list the opening chapter titles. A lot of Steal This Book
seems, today, three decades later, so, well, basic. Today, any
15-year-old already knows how to do a lot of these things. And
part of why they know it is because Abbie didn't just push the
envelope - he ripped it open, and declared everybody the winner
of the treasures inside. I was one of many early teens who used
that book to make free long distance telephone calls, to set
off firecrackers and M-80s as "time bombs" with a simple
wind-up alarm clock and some wires, and otherwise cause trouble.
Steal This Book was, above all, utilitarian and working-class.
It dealt with the basic necessities of life: how to eat, find
clothing and shelter, and (we accept this, as Abbie did, as a
basic human instinct) to have fun.

The press usually refers to Abbie as a "sixties radical"
(never mind that this, his most famous literary work, came out
in the seventies, or that his masterpiece political organizing
work occurred in the eighties). And it associates Abbie, accurately,
with the most well known causes of that era: particularly civil
rights, opposition to the Vietnam War and the defense of the
youth counter-culture that, today, has been thoroughly marketed
to death to three generations by the same forces that once opposed
it. Less spoken of, today, was the economic theory he laid out
with his first pamphlet - titled Fuck The System - and
in his first book, Revolution for the Hell of It. There
must be, said Abbie, "a better means of exchange than money."

And that's what Steal This Book focused on: How
to live free. He found cracks in the system, and rather than
hoard them for himself, he revealed his secrets. Some long-accepted
"facts of life" - that teenagers must obey their parents,
or other authorities, for example - simply fell by the wayside.
Other cracks found by Abbie and his pals were later sealed up
by the system (techniques revealed here for hacking public telephones
have long been technologically corrected and thus are obsolete;
Caveat Emptor). For that reason, many - but not all -
of the tips in Steal This Book are obsolete. Hitchhiking, anyone?
Ripping off automats? (Anyone under 30 know what an automat is?)
Draft dodging? Yes, there was a military draft to avoid back
then; there's not one today. Thank you, Abbie.

So when you get to the points of the book that are merely
pointing out the obvious and you proclaim, "Jesus! He's
telling us how to make a bookcase out of cinder blocks and lumber?
How lame is that?" that is the precise moment to pay
attention. On those pages, we see just how far behind American
society was only a few decades ago. Kids didn't have the Internet
then to seek out the information that their parents and the media
didn't want them to have. They didn't even have a hundred cable
TV channels. They had three television networks in the major
markets, and maybe one or two in rural areas. It was an atmosphere
of total control. There was no Bart Simpson. But there was Abbie
Hoffman, without whom Bart would not have been possible. And
he was a living, breathing person who got clubbed over the head,
spied on, infiltrated, outlawed, imprisoned, exiled, forgotten,
rediscovered, forgotten again, then, as Artaud wrote about Van
Gogh, he was suicided by society. And a whole hell of a lot of
what we take for granted today as basic "rights" are
here and present because real human beings fought for them, and
were persecuted for waging that fight. His era was full of heroes.
But none were as effectively heroic as Abbie.

To read Steal This Book today, in the 21st Century,
is an historical adventure. Thus, a little historic context may
be helpful. When he wrote Steal This Book, Abbie had been
on trial in Chicago in a conspiracy case - stemming from demonstrations
outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention - in what the
American Civil Liberties Union later called "the political
trial of the century." He was America's most widely-recognized
radical, a media personality, an emblem, a symbol, a myth, and
still - I may be giving away his secret weapon here - a human
being, obviously so, to anyone who encountered him in person
or through any media. He wasn't bigger than life, or better than
it. He was, in a word, alive. And this was better and more exciting
than the walking death that most celebrities offered then and
now.

Abbie recounts a
dialogue between Random House publisher Jason Epstein
and he when he was preparing to write Steal This Book.
He described it in the May 1974 issue of Harper's magazine,
in an essay titled "Steal This Author: In which the master
of the rip-off learns that anything he can do, big business can
do better." Abbie recounted that Epstein "roared
with laughter" at the idea of writing a book no one would
publish. "He had studied society," Abbie wrote of Jason.
"He knew how fame was bottled and that infamy was even more
salable in the fanciful world of pop politics." The dialogue
part is repeated here:

Jason: "What book are you going to do next?"

Abbie: "Jason, I'm going to write a book no one will
publish I'm going to call it Steal This Book, and it'll
be a handbook for living free, stealing, and making violent revolution.
I'm going to take on the entire publishing industry. I want to
test the limits of free speech."

Jason: "You'll lose, Abbie; everybody does in the
end."

Abbie: "We'll see."

The result is now legend. After being rejected by 30 publishers,
the book finally made it into print when Grove Press agreed to
publish Steal This Book, and was it one of the most smashing
successes, probably the most notorious, in publishing history.
Abbie turned the publishing of Steal This Book into a public
teach-in on the entire industry of bestsellers.

"Grove estimated that half the book sales were made
in New York City," wrote Abbie in his Harper's piece.
"In Pittsburgh no stores carried the book. In Philadelphia
only one store did, and it charged a dollar more than the cover
price. No books were to be found in Boston when I took reporters
on a tour. None in the San Francisco Bay area either. The entire
Doubleday chain of bookstores was boycotting the book. Vice-president
George Hecht stated, 'We don't want to tell people to steal.
We object only to the title. If it was titled How to Live for
Free, we'd sell it.'"

Dotson Rader then reviewed it for the New York Times
Book Review during John Leonard's disobedient tenure as editor,
even as the Times refused to accept advertising for Steal
This Book. "I clipped the review, wrote a check, and
sent the Times its own review for an ad," recalled
Abbie. The ad was rejected by the Times, that self-defined
cathedral of Freedom of the Press.

In one feel swoop, Abbie had accomplished what he'd set
out to do: "Test the limits of free speech." He exposed
where those fences truly were, and kicked many of them down in
the process.

Today, the lid is back on the book publishing industry.
I can hardly find a book worth shoplifting in the chain stores
that now dominate the industry. It's all formula. But if you
like books, or once liked them, even if you end up paying for
the new edition of Steal This Book, you're getting an
authentic book and that, in this age of corporate tyranny,
is a steal.

- Somewhere in Mexico, August 2001

Al Giordano worked with Abbie
Hoffman as a young political organizer in the 1980s. Today he
is publisher of The Narco News
Bulletin - www.narconews.com - reporting on the drug war from Latin America
and is (WAS!)
a free speech defendant - being sued by billionaires - in the
Drug War on Trial case in New York City.